RICELab Rethinking Interaction Collaboration and Engagement

Livestreaming asks a creator to perform continuously for an audience that talks back in real time. Several of the autistic streamers we spoke with described this as among the most meaningful social activity available to them. This project studied what livestreaming offers autistic adults, at what cost, and what platform and tool design could do about the cost.

Understanding the practice

We began by building Audience Bot, a chatbot that simulates an audience for a novice streamer to perform to, and ran an observational lab study of people learning to play and perform at the same time [Mok, T., Au Yeung, C., Tang, A., and Oehlberg, L. (2020). Talk Like Somebody is Watching: Understanding and Supporting Novice Live Streamers. In EA IMX 2020: Extended Abstracts of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences.] . We interviewed ten autistic Twitch streamers about their motivations [Mok, T., Tang, A., McCrimmon, A., and Oehlberg, L. (2022). Social Access and Representation for Autistic Adult Livestreamers. In ASSETS '22: The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility.] , and used reflexive thematic analysis to present their accounts of streaming in their own words [Mok, T., Tang, A., McCrimmon, A., and Oehlberg, L. (2023). Experiences of Autistic Twitch Livestreamers: "I have made easily the most meaningful and impactful relationships". In ASSETS 2023: Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility.] .

Co-designing with streamers

Running a co-design session is itself a design problem when participants vary widely in how they prefer to communicate. From ten semi-structured interviews we produced scenario-based design narratives and technology concepts to open those sessions with [Mok, T., Hartley, T., Tang, A., McCrimmon, A., and Oehlberg, L. (2024). Building Narratives and Probing Concepts: Preparing Materials for Co-Design with Autistic Livestreamers. In ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing.] . In a Research through Design co-design study with three autistic streamers, speculative artefacts served as the prompts, and we reported the tensions that shaped what the streamers were willing to design [Mok, T., Tang, A., and Oehlberg, L. (2026). Co-Designing with Autistic Livestreamers: Care, Constraints, and Trade-offs in Livestreaming. In Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '26).] .

This work was led by Terrance Mok as part of his doctoral research.

Publications